MarTech Interview with Elizabeth Maxson, CMO @ Contentful

Elizabeth Maxson, CMO at Contentful weighs in on the future of AI and how content marketers need to prep more to drive personalization across marketing journeys in this MarTech catch-up:

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Hi Elizabeth, tell us more about your martech and marketing journey.

I’ve worked in marketing for more than 18 years across a variety of industries, including finance, automotive and tech. My experience has been shaped by roles at non-profits, staffing agencies, and experience marketing agencies, which led me to a career at Salesforce.

Most recently I served as Chief Marketing Officer for Tableau, a Salesforce company, where I led GTM strategy, driving end-to-end marketing initiatives. Throughout my tenure at Salesforce I also worked across strategic events, corporate messaging & content, spearheaded marketing and operations for strategic technology partnerships, led marketing for another Salesforce acquisition, Quip, all of which allowed me to hone my versatility and expertise as a marketer. On the people side of things, I was focused on breaking down silos across the marketing department and empowering the team to be creative in marketing execution across multiple channels and to various personas.

All of these pieces have led to my next adventure to join Contentful as CMO. As I look to the future, I am excited about our ability to help customers navigate the world of AI and personalization and be able to talk to marketers as a marketer.

What about being Contentful’s newest CMO excites you most?

This is an exciting time for Contentful. When I first met the team, I could feel the energy behind the technology and thought, “This is what CMOs want to have.” We are delivering an essential tool that empowers marketers to own and scale the entire content management process and, ultimately, deliver the experiences that customers expect.

I’m also excited about how Contentful is approaching the use of AI and personalization within content marketing with our recent acquisition of Ninetailed. Brands can now deliver hyper-personalized messaging and generate higher ROI from their content and data investments, which is huge for marketing teams that are being asked to do more with fewer resources.

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Given the current extensive martech landscape, we’d love to know which martech platforms have always held a strong position in your top-use list and why?

In a world where AI and tech are evolving rapidly, I look for martech tools that are easily accessible globally, cost-effective, and provide in-app analytics. This is critical to ensuring my team is empowered with the resources to track and analyze trends and adjust marketing strategies in real-time.

When evaluating if a software solution is the right fit for your team, it’s important to find high-quality tools that add value to the overall business. Does the new application have capabilities that allow you to consolidate tools and allocate those resources? How easily will it plug into your existing tech stack? With the plethora of options on the market, any new tool we bring on has to be scalable to Contentful’s growth, including API capabilities and real-time collaboration.

Sprout Social is a tool that I am constantly impressed with, both from a marketing perspective and as a general user. It’s easy to use, has great API capabilities, and provides real-time analytics.

For marketers today who are still evaluating how to improve their content creation and content marketing cycles, what top tips come to mind along with top content marketing and martech platforms as suggestions?

For marketing teams to be successful, they must embody creativity, simplicity, agility, persistence, and passion regardless of their access to technology tools or marketing budget. Being able to creatively problem-solve while maintaining simplicity in messaging and marketing process is critical to breaking through the noise. Marketers need to remain agile and have the ability to pivot if something is not working.

When it comes to marketing technology, marketing teams need a scalable centralized tool that drives consistency across multiple markets, channels, and products – without help from engineering. This saves time and resources, especially when a lot of marketers are being asked to do more with less. The Contentful platform, for example, allows brands to create, organize, deploy, and optimize digital experiences in a highly scalable and efficient way, allowing more time for creativity.

What about the future of AI and content marketing is something more marketers should look forward to? Can you talk about the various ways in which you’ve seen marketers use AI to be more innovative with their marketing efforts?

What excites me most about the future of content marketing is honing in on the potential of personalization and AI to deliver new digital experiences. Personalization has been around for a long time, but having highly personalized content at every single touchpoint in a customer journey—something many brands are starting to explore —will ultimately lead to more engaging and relevant marketing strategies. Our customer, Ace & Tate is a great example of threading the needle. They introduced Contentful to create cohesion between the atmosphere they created in-store, driven by colorful displays and artists collaborations, to communicate the same brand vision through their online experiences.

We’ve also started to see AI’s impact on productivity and speed of creation. If you think about writing social, blog, and ad copy or even brainstorming, asking AI can often help you come to new ideas much more quickly.

Lastly, AI empowers marketers to analyze massive amounts of data quickly, which can be used to inform future campaigns and create opportunities to explore A/B testing, SEO, chatbots or virtual assistants. With AI, the future of A/B testing will focus less on differentiated verbiage and, instead, on creating a differentiated, personalized experience.

A few thoughts on the future of martech before we wrap up?

AI continues to be the largest driver of change within the martech industry. As more brands look to implement AI tools, CMOs will need to have a deeper understanding of trust, security, and regulations regarding the use of AI in brand marketing to ensure they are adhering to current regulations. Additionally, as the technical workforce expands its adoption of AI technology, our collective knowledge will continue to grow and provide new opportunities for innovation and creativity. And in some cases, marketing can lead the way.

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